TRACKING CONTROL FOR ROBOT MANIPULATORS WITH KINEMATIC AND DYNAMIC UNCERTAINTY

Abstract

The control objective in many robot manipulator applications is to command the end-effector motion to achieve a desired response. To achieve this objective, mapping is required to relate the joint/link control inputs to the desired Cartesian position and orientation. If there are uncertainties or singularities in the mapping, then degraded performance or unpredictable responses by the manipulator are possible. To address these issues, an adaptive tracking controller for robot manipulators with uncertainty in the kinematic and dynamic models is developed in this paper. The controller is developed based on the unit quaternion representation so that singularities associated with three parameter representations are avoided. Experimental results for a planar application of the Barrett whole arm manipulator (WAM) are provided to illustrate the performance of the developed controller.